D&D and Racial Essentialism

[S'mon]

How I hate Tolkien discussions.

But you're the one who started this thread! *sheesh*

 

[Kzach]

That dude says 'indeed' waaaaaay too much.

 

[Rechan]

I doubt your forensic anthropology class include eg pygmy negritos, khoi-san, or Australian aborigines. Presumably there are 3 main racial groups *in the US* which differ enough to be easily identifiable (Caucasian, West African, East Asian); Latinos of Mestizo origin will be harder to identify as such due to mixed ancestry. I'd expect forensic anthropologists working in southern Mexico to be able to distinguish fully-Caucasian from fully-indigenous-population skeletons though.

Yes - the three races are Caucasion, African and Asian skeletons. When I took the class (2003? 2004?) my teacher (the ME) said they were working on markers to distinguish Latino skeletal markers.

Point is, there is enough actual distinction to tell the difference purely by bones.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

In this latter case though, you've trade 'racial essentialism' for the claim that every race is deep down the same on the inside. I think simple biology ought to be enough to convict that position as nonsense.

Except maybe that's the message: you're forgetting in your argument that fiction can be about thing other than meticulously creating reality.

 

[Merkuri]

It does present a somewhat skewed picture when the only race in the game that gets more depth is humans.

The thing is, we're human, so we're biased.

You've got two choices here if you want to "fix" this. You can either limit the human race to a few key stereotypical characteristics - at which point it becomes unrealistic - or you can describe all other races as being varied and having multiple cultures with very few qualities in common - at which point the races just become humans with funny makeup.

I don't think this needs to be fixed, but if you do want to address it then the proper place is in your campaign world. You're free to

 

[Merkuri]

It does present a somewhat skewed picture when the only race in the game that gets more depth is humans.

The thing is, we're human, so we're biased.

You've got two choices here if you want to "fix" this. You can either limit the human race to a few key stereotypical characteristics - at which point it becomes unrealistic - or you can describe all other races as being varied and having multiple cultures with very few qualities in common - at which point the races just become humans with funny makeup.

I don't think this needs to be fixed, but if you do want to address it then the proper place is in your campaign world, not in the PHB. You're free to create as many elven cultures as you want. Some campaign worlds have done this. Somebody mentioned Eberron earlier and the dinosaur-riding halflings. Those aren't the only halflings in Eberron. Lots of halflings live in the Five Nations and have "integrated" into the predominant cultures there. That might not be the best example, but look at the elves of Eberron. There are the elves that have integrated in with the Five Nations culture, like the halflings, then there are the mongol-like elves that raid and conquer the steppes and the death-worshiping elves who live off the mainland (I forget where... it's been a while since I looked at that book).

The truth is D&D races are different ways of looking at humanity. They're what happens if we take humans and we say, "what if we lived underground?" or "what if we didn't age and lived for 500 years?"

If we start trying to make all the races as varied as humans then they lose what made them special in the first place. It may not feel realistic, but the truth is that we've never actually encountered another sentient species like us. For all we know we ARE unique in how varied we are.

So stop thinking about it so hard and go drink some grog with your dwarves.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

So stop thinking about it so hard and go drink some grog with your dwarves.

Except thinking so hard about it is what gets us into this mess: you could excise the racial psychologies/cultures and then not think so hard about how every race is just a human in funny makeup/a costume.

 

[howandwhy99]

Calling species races really is one of the most embarrassing elements of D&D. I can understand why Mr. Gygax included it given the strictures he was under to fit fantasy creatures in a roleplaying game as the practice was understood in the 70's, but that does not make the lasting term any more palatable.

That roleplaying was exclusively limited to human behavior as the concept was originally conceived meant fantasy creatures could only be acted out in the spectrum humans were capable of. That's something of a tautology given only humans play this game, but to fit them in under human performance they were called all sorts of things:
demi-humans (part human)
races (actually referring to phenotypes within homo sapiens as the playable portion)
humanoids (human-shaped creatures)

Understanding the history of roleplaying goes a long way in clarifying why these choices were made and terms used. It still doesn't remove race from the picture, but it is notable that real world human races are rarely brought up in D&D - and then normally as cultural attributes like Altarians typically being light-skinned and tall as well as worshipers of Turanis.

 

[Celebrim]

Have you seen the American family lately? More and more families are eating in shifts or completely alone. When my fiance was growing up his family hit a point where they would all prepare their own food and eat whenever they felt like it.

This is the general sort of objections that I thought I would get. I don't find it very compelling. The American penchant toward eating alone (or even standing up) is notably aberrent to the rest of the world, and even within the US the acceptance of eating alone is in notable tension with our biology (we comment on how wrong it is). For example, if we go to eat out, if we are alone, we get it to go and remain alone. We feel uncomfortable eating alone. Yet, if we invite someone to 'go get lunch', we are more likely to eat together in the social environment. Likewise, might 'not have time to eat' in our daily lives, but we still provide food at parties.

Most of all, our inner emotional lives regarding the experience of eating hasn't changed. We don't feel like not having someone with us when we eat. We don't believe it is impolite to offer to someone the oppurtunity to eat with us. When we are befriending another human, even another American, we don't provide an oppurtunity for them to get away from us so that they can eat comfortably. People don't have to be taught to eat together.

There are a lot of moral philosophies that say it's wrong to laugh at other people's misfortune.

Yes, and speaking as a member of one of those philosophical groups, one might say that its wrong to laugh at other people's misfortune, but typically culture that say this also believe that it is unnatural (or supernatural) to not laugh or experience joy at the misfortune of a stranger or more to the point an enemy. That is to say, that generally moral philosophies that say that it is wrong to experience joy at the misfortune of others (see America's Funniest Home Videos), also tend to believe that there is something wrong with humanities essential nature. For example, we say that its wrong to be greedy, but we don't deny that its part of the essential nature of people to be greedy. (Though to go back to a prior point, food greed isn't nearly as pronounced of an emotional response in humans as it is in bonobos or chimpanzees.)

These two things are hardly universal to all humans.

I don't think you've come anywhere close to establishing that, but even if you had that isn't nearly as strong of an objection as you think it is. Individuals may depart from the norm (a human that doesn't like to eat socially, an elf that doesn't love trees) and we still might be able to identify these things as part of the races essential nature. In fact, we are very close to an actually valid use of 'the exception proves the rule here'. We can cite 'an elf that doesn't love trees' as an exception, only because it is widely recognized that 'loving trees' is part of the essential nature of elves. We can recognize the aberrant case only because the normal case is well known, and if it wasn't normal for an elf to love trees we couldn't cite the individual as a counter-example.

Just as the fact that an elf has a +2 bonus to dex doesn't gaurantee that every elf is not clumsy, the races essential nature might not be apparant by looking at individuals, especially individuals several standard deviations from the mean. The essential nature might be most apparant when we look at groups, or especially when we look at trying to modify the behavior and culture of the group as a whole and how it resists the change. Perhaps some individuals depart from the mean. Perhaps its possible by training and self-discipline to work yourself away from you resting state. But its going to be hard or impossible to move the group far from its resting state, and over time its always going to slip back towards its normal modes of behavior.

But, earlier I promised I'd start providing some more interesting modes of essential human behavior:

Here's one.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk]YouTube - World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale[/ame]

All humans are musical, even the tone deaf ones, and even then we recognize 'tone deaf' as an aberrant case. But it doesn't necessarily follow that another species would be musical, much less that they'd recognize human music as music, much less that the universal emotional context of music (all human cultures can recognize and differentiate the soothing music of all other cultures from the exciting music, or sad music from happy music) would translate from one species to another. If you've ever listened to a male cat yowl disharmoniously in order to announce its virility, then take a moment to imagine that as the language of beauty and love.

What''s interesting about the above video is that McFarren is getting at a natural wiring between human spatial perception and human tonal perception. This too might not be natural for every species. For example, in humans, different sort of scales might not map as naturally - colors, numbers, brightness, etc. And some, muskiness, roughness of texture, density of dots, numbers of corners, might not map at all without some training to create the internal mapping (which would probably actually be a translation of some sort). But, for another species these sorts of maps might be natural, and they might struggle to come up with the noties in a mapping between space and tone.

These sort of things might seem small, but consider how much of the superficial trappings of culture is wrapped up in music and the preperation and consumption of food.

There are I think some very deeper mappings that have less to do with superficial identifiers of culture, but I'm afraid to get into them for fear of starting a flame fest.

As far as racial descriptions in D&D, I tend to take those as stereotypes. There are plenty of stereotypes in American and European culture that individuals of those groups go against. Heck, I'm one of them. Stereotypically, women aren't supposed to be into technology or like assembling furniture with power tools, yet here I am!

I'm digging after things far more powerful than sterotypes. Most sterotypes are based on cultural identification and most cultural identification exists to provide definition that distinguishes you from the group as the whole. So in many ways, cultural tropes are very much the opposite of what I'm going for here. Culture is (among other important things) how you signify the identity group you belong to, and this signal works best if it unique and easily recognizable. If the cultural attribute was something common to humanity, than it wouldn't work very well as an identifier.

We don't have alot of sterotypes of humans, and most of the ones that we have ('average', 'extremely good at kicking butt') are probably wrong because we don't have anything to compare ourselves too.

I also tend to take the races in D&D more like cultures than like distinct non-human species.

I think that they are too, but I think in no small part this is because the differences between PC races tend to be so small and depart so little from human norms (all the better to make them easily playable by humans).

So if a player wants to play an elf as a Scottish-accented beer drinking dude who likes to live underground, that's fine with me. He might get some in-character odd looks from NPCs but that's because of the elven stereotype. He's certainly not a typical elf, but he's still an elf.

If he's not a typical elf, then we have some way of knowing what a typical elf is.

And in any event, I personally feel that you are looking at 'departure from typical elf culture', and not the essential aspect of 'elfishness'. The essential aspects of elfishness are things that RPGs typically don't emphasis enough, in my opinion. In my campaign, if I started listing the universal aspects of elvishness IMC I'd probably do some things like the following:

1) They live for a long time.
2) They are xenophobic.
3) They would rather hear stories than eat, and they need to hear stories (and poetry and music) as much as they need to eat. Gluttony isn't a vice elves really worry about, and to the extent it is, it is the vice of neglecting themselves while they overconsume of literature and art.
4) They cannot be enslaved. At all. An elf that is confined loses the will to live and dies.

 

[Celebrim]

Calling species races really is one of the most embarrassing elements of D&D.

Given that D&D humans and elves can freely hybridize (and so can humans and orcs), is it really right to call them species?